Holy Cross and Bucknell Leave NIT and NCAA Tourney With Highest Honors

Although Wisconsin had to rally to beat Bucknell on Sunday, and St. Joe's was battling with Holy Cross to the very end on Monday, there are no shortage of smiles coming from athletic directors all around the Patriot League. In the span of a week, the Patriot League went from "Why are these guys in the tournament?" to "Why shouldn't there have been 2 Patriot League teams in the NCAA tournament?"

What a turn of events! Congratulations to Bucknell and Hoy Cross, who may just have ushered in a new era of Patriot League basketball!

Permit me to go on about basketball for another moment longer..

What will happen because of this?Bucknell will without a doubt be in a "Bracket Buster" game on ESPN during the regular season... guaranteed. Next year will feature 5 teams (Holy Cross, Bucknell, American, Lehigh, Colgate) who all have a chance to compete for the PL title -- with 3 teams returning 5 starters, in Lehigh, Bucknell, and Holy Cross.

I'm especially encouraged not only by the upsets, but in both Bucknell's loss to Wisconsin and Holy Cross' loss to St Joe's tonight, that they were close games and they played tough the whole way through.

I invented a word tonight: surgence. If there's such a thing as a resurgence, then why not a surgence? Patriot League Basketball was mired at a certain level since its inception. But now, with NIT and NCAA wins, this could spell a surgence into a different level of basketball. This could be really special!

Coming soon: NFL Draft, Spring Football, and Kevin Higgins to the Citadel?

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How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

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It's what we do every week: copiously go over the opposing game notes and analyze the upcoming game matchup. I'm starting to call these the "football nerd" previews because it feels like the audience for these detailed team breakdowns are other football nerds like myself. For Lehigh fans, there is no greater need for a "football nerd"-level breakdown of an opponent than Merrimack. Few opponents have been as big as an unknown to Mountain Hawk fans as the school that formed right after World War II in North Andover, Massachusetts. Helping that sense of mystery is that the Merrimack Athletics' website offers no football game notes, and when you click on the link called "Weekly Two-Deep", you get a two-deep from 2018. Merrimack, until recently a member of the Northeast-10 conference in Division II, announced they are going to join the NEC as a full Division I member in time for the 2023-2024 season. “The College’s 2011 strategic ...

Fifteen Guys Who Might be Lehigh's Next Football Coach (and Five More)

If you've been following my Twitter account, you might have caught some "possibilities" as Lehigh's next head football coach like Lou Holtz, Brett Favre and Bo Pelini . The chance that any of those three guys actually are offered and accept the Lehigh head coaching position are somewhere between zero and zero. (The full list of my Twitter "possibilities" are all on this thread on the Lehigh Sports Forum .) However the actual Lehigh head football coaching search is well underway, with real names and real possibilities. I've come up with a list of fifteen possible names, some which I've heard whispered as candidates, others which might be good fits at Lehigh for a variety of reasons. UPDATE: I have found five more names of possible head coaches that I am adding to this list below. Who are the twenty people? Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Lehigh Football Nation

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